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Youth Manifesto by Skylar Fein

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Best known for the searingly evocative Remember the Upstairs
Lounge installation at the Prospect.1 biennial last year,
Skylar Fein turns his attention to punk rock in this Youth
Manifesto show at NOMA. Again there are realistic trappings and
graphic documentation, but the subjects couldn't be more different. The
Upstairs Lounge was an obscure gay bar that caught fire under
mysterious circumstances in 1971, killing at least 32 trapped patrons.
Punk was an example of a cultural movement that began as a youthful
rebellion and rapidly morphed into a marketing sensation of sorts. The
Upstairs Lounge was a colorful yet profoundly tragic
place. Punk rock became a postmodern echo chamber as it was subsumed by
the culture it once rebelled against, rendering it a mass mediated hall
of mirrors — an electronic mirage rather than a fiery flameout.
Consequently, where the Upstairs Lounge exhibit was
gut-wrenchingly elegiac, Youth Manifesto is ironically
nostalgic.

Punk's visual legacy is a wide array of memorabilia Fein
replicates in his artfully playful style, with iconic groups like the
Clash, Adam and the Ants and Hüsker Dü all turning up in
outsized replicas of ticket stubs, posters and T-shirts. There's even a
Cyndi Lauper poster paired with a Cyndi Lauper bedsheet (pictured) amid
sculptural recreations of 1980s boom boxes and guitar amps. The result
is a recreation of the flip side of the Reagan era, an unusually
taxonomic celebration of a familiar yet distant time. And if it lacks
the searing punch of the Upstairs Lounge project, it does
at least inject a new perspective into the eclectic mix of NOMA's
galleries, setting off such oddities as Henry Darger's expressionistic
child-world panorama Hurry, It'll Explode Any Minute Now,
Allan McCollum's 25Perfect Vehicles
display case of striped burial urns and Mel Chin's I Don't Want
To silver tray fringed with Mayan gods and Belizean flint
ceremonial blades, all of which convey something of the eternal,
prickly, underlying spirit of punk. — D. Eric
Bookhardt